A few days after its general meeting, TotalEnergies finds climate activists on Wednesday at the Paris court. A coalition of NGOs and communities, including the cities of Paris and New York, is asking the courts to force the oil and gas giant to align its climate strategy with the Paris agreement. The judges’ decision on this issue is not expected before 2024 or even 2025. But the hearing scheduled before the 5th civil chamber of the judicial court, will be, unless further postponed, the first opportunity to see the coalition and the French group sharpen their arguments on this case, which dates back to June 2019.
In the long term, the coalition – which brings together six NGOs such as Sherpa and France Nature Environnement, and sixteen communities, including the cities of Grenoble, Bayonne or Nanterre – hopes to one day obtain a French equivalent of the condemnation of Shell in the Netherlands. In 2021, a court condemned the British oil giant to accelerate its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In the immediate future, the coalition is asking the pre-trial judge (a magistrate responsible for ruling on questions prior to the examination of the case on Wednesday) to take an exceptional provisional measure: order TotalEnergies to “suspend exploration and exploitation of new hydrocarbon deposits that have not been the subject of a final investment decision”, and this until the judgment of the case on the merits.
To justify the urgency, the coalition invokes, among others, the UN Secretary General António Guterres. “Fossil fuel producers (…) continue to fight to increase production, knowing full well that their economic model is incompatible with the survival of humanity,” he said in January. The coalition also relies on the International Energy Agency (IEA), which deemed it necessary in 2021 to cease all new hydrocarbon exploration projects in order to hope to respect the Paris agreement.
Opposite, the lawyers of TotalEnergies will plead to challenge the admissibility of this almost unprecedented legal action. The procedure was started in January 2020 when the coalition sued TotalEnergies for breach of “its duty of vigilance” on the environmental impact of its activities. NGOs and communities, socialists or environmentalists for the most part, considered that the “vigilance plan” published in 2019 by the group did not respect this duty, imposed since 2017 by a pioneering French law on corporate responsibility.
For the coalition, the climate strategy presented by the oil giant, one of the twenty largest emitters of CO2 in the world, was “clearly insufficient” with regard to the objectives of the Paris agreement of 2015, which aims to limit global warming well below 2°C and if possible at 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial era. Eight months earlier, as required by law, the coalition had “formalised” TotalEnergies to “take the necessary measures to prevent the major risks linked to climate change”.
Since then, the procedural battle has continued behind the scenes on this growing but still in its infancy legal process. In 2022, the cities of New York and Paris joined the coalition. In another attempt to exploit this judicial innovation opened up by the “duty of vigilance” law, the NGOs which attacked TotalEnergies for the impact of its oil mega-project Tilenga-Eacop in Uganda and Tanzania, were dismissed in February by the Paris court.
Faced with criticism, the CEO of TotalEnergies did not give up on Friday, during the general meeting of shareholders in Paris. “Our company was the major which invested the most to build the energy model of tomorrow which will be based on electricity”, via renewable energies, defended Patrick Pouyanné, adding that he could not reduce in the immediate its oil activity since the demand “at the world level” increases.
In its current strategy, the group plans to devote a third of its investments to low carbon energies in the decade, but it is still associated with oil and soon even more with gas, its priority.
